James Poulos writes about political news, focusing on our choices for liberty and our options for reform. He's a columnist at The Daily Beast, the host of the Free Radicals podcast, and the frontman of a band called Black Hi-Lighter.

Libertarian Populism Isn't A Zero-Sum Game

Now that libertarian populism is catching on as Something Worth Talking about in the endless virtual Georgetown cocktail party that is the internet, I’m going to continue to show how anthropological thinking can give us better access to what, exactly, libertarian populism can be about.

The latest conversation point comes courtesy of Ezra Klein, for whom libertarian populism seems to posit that the political economy is a zero-sum game. “Positing this zero-sum death struggle between corporate America and poorer Americans,” he writes, “is the key to the emergent arguments around ‘libertarian populism.’ The basic idea there is that if Washington would simply close its doors to corporate pleading then corporations would lose political power and the policy concessions that go with it and lower-income Americans would win economic power. In a zero-sum world, less ‘crony capitalism’ for corporations equals more economic uplift for the poor.”

I’m not surprised that Ben Domenech is already pushing back against these claims. But I think this is the kind of debate you get when you approach the controversies and possibilities surrounding our political economy from a policy-first standpoint, rather than an anthropology-first one. Like all political pitches, libertarian populism won’t enroll the tons of adherents it needs if it boils down to “Less For Them, More For You.” I don’t think it does boil down to that motto, and I do think that getting anthropological gives us the tools to see why.

So consider the idea that no political platform works if it’s simply “Them Less, You More.” Yes, this means that even communism doesn’t move and inspire people on the level of sheer class envy or greed. Envy is a powerful anthropological force, to be sure — but it’s always woven into a strong, emotionally-organizing sense of what being human is all about. One way of understanding the failure of communism is to treat it as a failure of the anthropological imagination: it turns out that “the poor” can be extraordinarily envious of “the rich,” yet extraordinarily amenable to letting the ultra-rich run the political economy. All the ultra-rich have to do is appease that sense of envy by sacrificing whatever happens to be deemed “enough” in the way of cash flow. The communist view of solidarity and revolution is a romantic one, a piece of poetry about what our species being entails. This is all right there in Marx — communism is merely the path to achieving our actual species being. The Marxist anthropology is very simple-minded when it comes to the many different ways that envy and greed can be operationalized in a nominally “capitalist” political economy.

FOR INSTANCE: our political economy — the one that libertarian populism is all about transforming away from — is one, as I’ve suggested, that’s defined by a suffocatingly powerful alliance between the poor and the ultra-rich. Ezra knows this:

That’s the reality of politics right now: Corporate American and the poor can both wield a lot of power at the same time, as they’re not typically locked in a zero-sum struggle with each other. If anything, it’s the middle class, or perhaps the upper-middle class, that’s been left out.

This should all be crystal clear to Ezra, since it defines Obamanomics to a tee, and almost completely explains why and how Obamacare is having the successes and failures it’s having. It also throws open the shutters on the terrain and the stakes of the moral argument surrounding universal health care. As I put it in my quick look at what’s at stake in the libertarian populism debate:

Rather than defining corruption as Chait thinks Republicans do — by putting a price tag on Solyndra — Tocqueville defined it as the means, not the end, of concentrating political power. Remarkably, Chait does not seem to grasp that not Solyndra but Obamacare is the example of crony capitalism par excellence. The use of Obamacare as a path toward concentrated power works almost exactly as Tocqueville implies: Some of our biggest, most powerful economic winners — the titans of the health industry — are drawn to Washington and made captive “partners” of the Court. They surrender their independence to the Sovereign as they surrender their pride — opting to work with the Sovereign for the Good of All.

Obamacare must be the kind of healthcare system produced by policymakers working for our poor-ultrarich political alliance — because that alliance isn’t driven by interests or passions; it’s driven by a deeply shared sense of what being human is all about. For very many of the poor and the ultrarich, subservience to the state is necessary for our humanity to be expressed in real life. It’s revealing how quickly some progressives of any socioeconomic class resort to the same epithets for upper-middle-class or aspiring upper-middle-class folk who bristle at the idea that embracing a subservient relationship to government is a moral act in accordance with an accurate grasp of our anthropology. Selfish! Greedy! Racist!

Well, maybe, but what’s really going on here is that these progressives despise — as I alluded to in the same post on what’s at stake — the anthropology of the “non-Court elite,” the person of substantial but not extravagant means who does not think, as Hobbes thought, that being human in a way that works requires everyone, themselves included, to take a knee before the Sovereign. No matter how charitable, modest, and humane such a person might be, they will always come under fire from a certain corner of the Left for being, as Hobbes charged, prideful. The key here is to understand that, for these progressives as well as for Hobbes, a prideful rejection of subservience to government is morally evil because it results from an incorrect anthropology. It misunderstands what being human entails. It misunderstands our species being. It can only breed social and personal ills. The purpose of politics is to break this mistaken dream, and replace it with a new vision of what to glory in.

Now, consider what anthropology puts libertarian populism into a context that can work well for lots of people. Obviously it’s not the kind of progressive, Hobbesian anthropology that defines our human being in a statist and nationalist way. Nor is it one, again, in which our human being is defined by the acquisition and consumption of material resources. In keeping with my sense of what kind of answer can work in the way we’d want, I propose that libertarian populism chimes in an especially tuneful way with an anthropology that sees us as the creatures who can choose to create love through language. That may seem a bit abstract, a bit obvious, or a bit banal, depending on your critical prejudices. But consider that this anthropology has a much different political upshot from the main anthropologies competing for adherents in America today. It doesn’t point toward neo-Hobbesian progressivism. It doesn’t point toward neo-conservative paternalism (or maternalism). It doesn’t point toward yuppie-scum faux-libertarianism. It doesn’t point toward crony capitalist, Chamber-of-Commerce Republicanism. It does open up on the proposition that government doesn’t need to save us, that a fundamentally moral subservience to the state isn’t anthropologically necessary. It does demand a transformation of our political economy on an anthropological basis — away from the stewardship of big brains and big hearts in big business and big government, and toward the rather risky and very alive collaboration of people who see themselves as pretty much empty vessels but for their shared promises and projects.

It’s not an anthropology of improvement. It’s an anthropology of transformation. As the economic theorist James Buchanan recognized, in the act of choosing, accurately grasped, we can actually create the choices from which we can choose. Subservience to the state reinforces a vision of life, shared by those who rule and those who are ruled, that sees being human as all about improvement projects. The anthropology I’m proposing for libertarian populists sees being human as all about the virtual opposite — unforeseeable transformations, at the personal level and the human level. That’s the essence of a game that’s anything but zero-sum: inherently creative, open-source, universal, and unable to be captured by planners and forecasters. (And, incidentally, it’s a language game that chimes in a crazily powerful way with our dreams surrounding the biggest transformation of real life that we’ve seen in centuries: the internet…)

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